Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

First published in 2002.

One moment, Sir Sam Vimes is in his old patrolman form, chasing a sweet-talking psychopath across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork. The next, he's lying naked in the street, having been sent back thirty years courtesy of a group of time-manipulating monks who won't leave well enough alone. This Discworld is a darker place hat Vimes remembers too well, three decades before his title, fortune, beloved wife, and impending first child. Worse still, the murderer he's pursuing has been transported back also. Worst of all, it's the eve of a fabled street rebellion that needlessly destroyed more than a few good (and no so good) men. Sam Vimes knows his duty, and by changing history he might just save some worthwhile necks - though it could cost him his own personal future. Plus there's a chance to steer a novice watchman straight and teach him a valuable thing or three about policing, an impressionable younger copper named Sam Vimes. (book back blurb)

While it had its moments, I have to say I struggled to get through this one. I just didn’t find it all that interesting. I did, however, pull some excellent lines from the text–

“Old Tom, the University’s venerable clock, tolled not sounds but silences. Not simple ordinary silences, but intervals of noise-absorbing nonsound, which filled the world with loud soundlessness.”–Footnote

“The Watchmen turned and stared. A large blob of foam, which up until that point had been performing sterling service in the cause of the essential decencies, slipped slowly to the floor.”–Ridcully exposing himself

“Because of pressures of space, bones in the crypt were stored by size, not by owner. There were rooms of ribs. There were avenues of femurs. And shelf after shelf of skulls up near the entrance, of course, because a crypt without a lot of skulls wasn’t a proper crypt at all. If some of the religious were right and there really was bodily resurrection one day, Fred mused, there was going to be an awful lot of confusion and general milling about.”–Fred Colon

“He just wished she was a bit more sensible about cats. He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence.”–Havelock

“”You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom!” he [Reg Shoe] screamed.

“Carcer’s men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe. Vimes could see their lips moving as they tried to work it out.”–Vimes

As you can see, some quite funny lines. I’m fondest of the last one with the Mel Gibson taunt. That was great! But other than that, I found the book rather, well, pointless.

Vimes went back in time to relive this lilac battle of theirs where he encounters himself. There’s one suspension of disbelief that came crashing down. I know Vimes was wearing an eye patch but really, did no one, including Young Sam, not make the connection that the two looked remarkably alike? I know 25 years can make a decent difference in a man’s looks but the way I’ve pictured Vimes, he isn’t someone that let himself go to hell over the years. While he might not be as virile as he was then, I don’t think it’s too far out there to say that there would have been a resemblance.

He went back in time because of some monks wanting to correct something. That something passed straight over my head, especially since we hardly see the monks at all in this book. Then again I glossed over some of the parts when I was reading so I could have rightly missed it. But from what I saw, the battle was played out exactly as it was before, the only difference was Vimes as Keel and future Carcer on the opposing side. Everything else the monks “took care of.”

Which leads me into the whole time warp thing. Time’s a tricky thing to play with but I guess if your younger self doesn’t even recognize his older self when he’s right smack in front of him, anything can happen. Nothing is identical. Nothing. So when Vimes goes back in time, things are played out, especially before he takes Keel’s position, that didn’t happen the last time which would cause a ripple effect into the future. Things would change, however slightly, but they could rightly be detrimental to Vimes’s own future, which they weren’t. He went back in the end and everything was the same. That irked me that nothing was different even though nothing could have been exactly the same the second time around, even when you factor in the whole “it repeats in history” notion. He found out that Vetinari knew about the weirdness but that didn’t change anything. He always knew.

The biggest thing that I had issues with was the monks “taking care of everything” off the page. Any rift that could have appeared due to inconsistencies like I said above was “handled.” Everything ended up la-dee-da because I said so and just believe it. This could rightly be called taking the easy way out but I guess your characters don't have to deal with the consequences of time travel if you don't want them to.

In that same vein, there was quite a lot of head-hopping going on, even outside of the section breaks, not to mention POV shifts mid-sentence, at the least. And then the one lone chapter that spanned the entire book. I'm still kind of baffled by what actually constitutes he-hopping because it seems to vary by author. What I may see as head-hopping someone else might see as an easy and elegant transition from one character to another on the same page. I guess it's like lilac. My mom loves the smell of it. To me is smells like dog shit. Literally. To each their own, I guess, and even better if it smells nice to the right people.

I wasn’t fond of this book, mainly for the reasons I listed above. The whole “we’ll take care of it” off the page thing really put me in a damper about it. It just seemed too easy. In the end, though, what was the point of Vimes going back in time? So he could relive the same battle again? So he could play a different roll in it? I didn’t see any drastic changes in him so, really, why?

Thud! by Terry Pratchett

First published in 2005.

Once, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom Valley, trolls and dwarfs met in bloody combat. Centuries later, each species still views the other with simmering animosity. Lately, the influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens--a volatile situation made far worse when the pint-sized provocateur is discovered bashed to death . . . with a troll club lying conveniently nearby.

Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch is aware of the importance of solving the Hamcrusher homicide without delay. (Vimes's second most-pressing responsibility, in fact, next to always being home at six p.m. sharp to read Where's My Cow? to Sam, Jr.) But more than one corpse is waiting for Vimes in the eerie, summoning darkness of a labyrinthine mine network being secretly excavated beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. And the deadly puzzle is pulling him deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred and fear--and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself. (book back blurb)

Terry Pratchett's right up there with Neil Gaiman in the fantasy worship department. His is another name that I heard most often when starting all of my fantasy research so it was only natural that I picked up one of his books. At random. I knew of Discworld and I knew he'd written a bunch of books for that particular series. Thankfully it's not an ordered series, not really. I have no idea where Thud! falls in the Discworld order but I know it's not at the beginning nor the end and I didn't have any problems understanding what was going on. I'm almost positive, from what I've heard, that that was Pratchett's intent with this series. If you read them in order, then yes, they'd make a little more sense and you'd get a few more jokes but if you read them all mashed up, you wouldn't get lost in the mire. Those are my kind of series!

The only notion I had going into reading his book was that he’s [Pratchett's] funny. He’s certainly not the snort your soda type of funny but it’s a dry, British wit that if you don’t get the satire, you’re just not going to get it. I got it and thought some of his lines were absolutely hilarious. Tawneee’s nose going blort when she blew it tickled me in just the right way (but not that way, if you catch my drift, pervert).

It’s a sardonic, bored-with-life-but-never-coming-up-short-with-things-to-mock type of funny that really makes you appreciate the humor. Anyone can slip on a banana peel or miss-sit on a toilet seat and have it be funny but the poignant words and the near intricacy of Pratchett’s funny bone is remarkable. This is the type of humor that takes true talent. It’s all in the order of the words, how he chose them, what he chose and then just how they spring up on you, as if from out of nowhere. There’s little to no build-up and the hilarity is often told in something of an aside, an off-handed comment that’s there and gone before you know it. Poosticks, for example. Poosticks!

On the fantasy side, it’s pretty high fantasy but without all of the floofy, tweedle dee, prance around in a tutu throwing glitter with pixe farts type of high that tends to come with such a sub genre (to be obnoxiously stereotypical). It’s a work that’s very grounded in a world that isn’t our own but could be, surrounded by magical creatures of all kinds that had acclimated to society as if it were part of their normal evolutionary track. It could have rightly been a parallel world that could have existed in place of our own and we really wouldn’t have noticed save for a few trolls (I could roll with that, but I’ll leave it for now).

Perhaps it’s the satire itself that makes it seem so real. The discord between the trolls and the dwarfs could easily mimic any kind of racial or political divide that exists now. Or perhaps it’s the parody, Pratchett taking the stereotypes of a token butler and putting them all into Willikins gives him an astounding air of Ben Stein calm mixed with Jason Statham ass-kicking. Be it the satire, the parody or the drive for Vimes to be a good dad to his son regardless of the obstacles in his way, or all of these elements and then some combined into one, it all probably plays a part into this fantastical reality of Pratchett’s.

I don’t know if I’ll read this one again for a while, though, because I feel this kind of humor in book form is good the first time through and each subsequent time it’s read its impact lessens if read too consecutively. The voice is amazing, I love the way it’s written but I’ll probably only put one more read into it before putting it down and not coming back to it for a while. A book like this needs its time to sink in order to really appreciate everything it has to offer before getting picked up again. It needs its space but deserves to be read more than once throughout its lifetime.